What's New - 2016 Spring

Major new features

Custom Fields

We now have the ability to store arbitrary, normalized information on a number of objects in the system including:

Customers

Events (and templates)

Equipment

Items for sale

Event registrations (via questionnaires, see below)

Some examples include:

Customers

Birth date

Allergy/medical information

ASA Member Number

Events

What to bring?

Location

Equipment

Length

Beam

Draft

Fields are full fledged members of our database and in our next release will be fully searchable and indexed. In the meantime, they can be used to store any additional information you wish to track. Once added, they become fully integrated into the UI, showing in the “Custom Fields” box on the user profile and as part of the general attributes for all other item types.

We do not yet have a UI for creating new fields. Contact support@pinfirelabs.com with any requests to add information.

Event questionnaires

Built on custom fields, you can now add questionnaires that appear both before (during registration) and after an event. These allow you to capture normalized information during event signup. These are intended to replace the “Additional Information” field, although that can still be used, if desired.

To set up questionnaires, visit an event page and click the new “Questionnaires” tab on the “Edit event page”

On this page, you can add both “pre-trip (signup)” questionnaires and post-event surveys

Questionnaires are shared between different events, allowing you to ask the same questions for multiple events without having to set up each one separately. In this example, we created a general “Paddle Trip Signup Questionnaire”.

To attach a questionnaire to an event, click the green “Add” button. On this next page, you can either pick an existing questionnaire to link to an event or create an entirely new questionnaire

To create a new questionnaire, click “Create a new questionnaire”. On the next page, fill out the name, description (admin only) and a prompt for the customer.

Once you’ve created the questionnaire, we need to add questions to it. Click “Add Question” at the top right.

Next, enter the text for the question, optional help text and a data type. We support the following data types:

Short text

Long text

Date (year)

Date (month / year)

Date (month / year / day)

Number (integer)

Number (decimal)

Drop-down list

Multi-choice drop-down list

True / false

Once you have a few questions added, you can sort them by clicking the plus sign and dragging them to the order you want. Once you have the proper order, be sure to press “Save question order” to save.

Pre-trip questionnaires are prompted to the user during event registration, both for paid and unpaid events.

If there is more than one questionnaire linked to an event, they will be prompted in succession.

Once registered for an event, a customer/member can view and update their answers at the top of the event page.

Event leaders can view the responses in a few ways.

The first is in the participant list:

Next, they can click the new “Signup Questions” button in the toolbar to view aggregated responses

Questionnaires can also be added to manually registered participants (via “Add Member”), but they are optional.

You can also create post-trip surveys. When an event is complete, a notice will show at the top of the page:

An easy way to remind users to fill out these surveys is by using the new “Event Follow Up” email and to include a link back to the event page.

New Events Calendar

The events calendar has been completely rewritten to provide a view that works for both clubs that host a lot of events (HSC) and others (everyone else). It is also now filterable, so you can view only certain categories of events (and a club’s events if on a multi-club site).

In addition to the “month” view, which is similar to the old calendar, you can also view events by week or day. This works best for clubs that have no more than a few events per day.

Event categories also now support colors so you can color different events on the calendar, based on category. To assign colors to a category, visit “Administer Event Categories” in the top menu, then click the Pencil to edit an individual category. Click in the “Color” field to enter a HTML color code (#AAAAAA) or click the box to the right to open a color picker

Recurring Date Support

We now support recurring events and equipment reservations. This can save data entry time for events and reservations that occur on a repeating schedule.

To create a recurring event, you need to create the event from an event template. Click “Create event” in the Events menu, then “Create event from template”. On this screen, you’ll notice the new “Recurrence” option. Click “Add”.

You can repeat events daily, weekly, on a certain day of the month and annually

Once you have picked the schedule for your event or reservation (they share the same dialog), you will be prevented the the follow screen, where you can fine-tune the schedule by removing individual events. This way you can say have a weekly class that you skip on a holiday. Click “Remove” next to any individual event you with to skip creating.

Invitation to pay for events

There are two ways to add a customer/member is added to a paid event manually: through the POS or through the event page. Adding a customer to an event through the POS implies that you have collected payment from the user. The new “request payment” feature allows you to add a customer to an event and then email them a link to complete payment using your online credit card processor. This feature can be used in a variety of scenarios including:

Member calls on the phone and you do not wish to take credit card information over the phone (risking PCI compliance issues and also running the risk of writing something down wrong)

A spot opens up for someone from the wait list and they are moved to a participant. With this feature, you can let them be moved to a participant spot and sent an email to now complete payment.

You will see this feature available for paid events in which a customer has not completed a payment option in full. In this example, “Test User” is added manually to a “Sailing 1” class. Clicking on their participant entry reveals the “Request Payment” button:

Clicking the “Request Payment” button will open a dialog containing a special link that can be emailed to the user to complete payment for the event. To save time, you can compose the email right in the dialog, or use an external program to send the link.

When the user clicks the link, the item will be added to their cart and they will be automatically logged in (this is necessary since customers might not have yet been assigned a username/password). They can then complete checkout as normal.

Event Template Payment Packages

We now support multiple different payment options and packages for event templates, just as have for events since the previous major version. Templates can now have multiple payment options and/or multiple payments.

New Email Templates

We have added new email templates in the following scenarios:

Event rescheduling - the dates of an event have changed. Emailed to event participants to notify them of the new dates

Event follow-up - sent 24 hours after an event completes. Use to send links to surveys, encourage signing up for additional classes, etc.

Equipment Checkout Email - sent when equipment is checked out. Use to remind loanees of your items of your policies and return date.

Invitation to pay (see above)

Hidden Events

We now control, via the “view hidden events” permission who can view events that do not have a public visibility (unopened, pending opening) from view.

Events API

You can now query event listings via a REST API. This is used internally for the calendar and our CMS product. Contact us for technical details if interested.

Election Support

Club Manager can now manage elections for non-profit organizations. Elections can be run either in “instant runoff” or “plurality” mode and can be open to a variety of memberships. This was launched for, and successfully used for various Hoofers’ elections this spring.

Refund Support

The financial system now supports recording of refunds. This feature can be used for recording either in-person or online refunds. Internally it creates a new “refund” transaction that is a reverse of the original one, ensuring reporting and accounting details.

Refunds can either be given in full, on an item-by-item basis or even on a per-account basis for a partial refund of a particular item.